So, I’m just back from the annual conference of the American Historical Association, and here’s a blog I never thought I would write…in defense of scholars reading papers at academic conferences. Something I never do anymore.
My colleagues in the sciences and in medicine probably have no idea what I’m even talking about, because this is never done at their conferences.
I’m talking about the practice of a historian (or other humanities scholar) standing before his/her audience literally reading from a paper s/he has written for the occasion. Reading, line by line. No kidding.
This would never happen in the sciences or medicine. Actually, I remember once seeing a humanities scholar do this at a science conference, and a scientist turned to me, aghast, and asked me, “How could this person be so unprepared that she would read a paper?” I tried to explain to him that in the humanities, if we don’t read from a paper, we are considered unprepared.
In general, I hate listening to someone read a paper. And whoo-ee, I know why; I heard some dreadful renditions of this ritual at the AHA (though fortunately not in my session, where the panelists were unusually good at delivering papers). I wrote to a friend afterwards that some of the readings were so extraordinarily dull that it was as if the presenter was trying to absolve us all, though sheer boredom, of the sin of having fallen in love with history.
But–in part because the readers at my panel were so good–I left the conference actually feeling like paper-reading is an art that, rather than being abandoned, should simply be better practiced. At an open discussion on disability issues, several historians noted that paper-reading can actually help folks in the audience with certain disabilities. For example, if the presenter gets a paper to a sign language interpreter in advance, the interpreter can be well prepared to clearly convey the ideas therein to those in the audience who use ASL. Keeping presenters to strict time limits–which can happen if we keep them to strict page limits–also ensures that audience members with slowed mobility can make it from session to session without missing work of interest to them. (And in that classic scenario where a disability accommodation benefits us all, who among us wouldn’t be grateful for a system that keeps presenters from droning on and on?)
But you know what? The event that really made me want to preserve the ritual of paper-reading happened a week before the conference: I was reading the 24 commentaries written in response to my tome on the history of the Bailey book controversy. And so many scholars had so many basic facts wrong, it just made me nuts. (Still does. I’ll say so in my formal response.) I can’t believe that professional scholars can be that sloppy when it comes to publishing work in a scholarly journal. I mean, don’t they care?
Historians do. As a group, we are sticklers for accuracy, for evidence, for documentation. And that, I think, is one reason to remain wedded to the practice of reading papers, because it requires writing papers, which at some level seems designed to ensure–in a way PowerPoint presentations do not–that standards of scholarship remain high. I was struck by this as I listened to the other panelists in my session. Their papers were beautiful examples of well-researched, well-evidenced, well-illustrated original history. They impressed me and gave me that thrill I get from listening to the work of true historians.
What did they do right in their readings? I.e., how could other people do to do a better job reading papers? For starters:
- Keep the paper length short enough to fit the time alloted. It is just obnoxious and unprofessional to do otherwise.
- Write your paper like someone is going to have to listen to it being read. (Duh!) For example, avoid long sentences with lots of clauses.
- Have a narrative arc with some “stage directions” about where you’ve been and where you’re going with this paper. We need a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s how we listen best.
- Make sure you insert the words “quote” and “unquote” where we listeners need you to signal the start and end of quotations. (Please don’t torture us by saying “quote” at the start and never saying “unquote” at the end.)
- Give us some comic relief, if at all possible.
- Avoid jargon, unless it functions as comic relief.
- Please, please consider bringing a few pictures on PowerPoint to give us something to look at while you read. We’re not all so old that we don’t appreciate some interesting pictures.
- Read enthusiastically. Model yourself on a Baptist choir rather than on a bunch of monks chanting. Make us believe you care about what you’re reading to us.
Great. Now that we have all that settled, maybe I can propose we selectively follow our colleagues in Performance Studies. I hear they sometimes strip naked during their presentations. I have a few candidates for this practice in mind. And I think it might really boost conference attendance, and make up for the brown corduroy problem. But it’s late, and I’m tired from travel, so I’ll just save my list of nominees for another blog….